Gertrude Bell

 

GERTRUDE BELL

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2006 by Manoir La Roche Ltd.
Maps copyright © 2006 by Raymond Turvey
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published in 2006 by Macmillan, Great Britain, as
Daughter of the Desert
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2007

Many of Gertrude Bell's letters, diaries, and papers are reproduced here by kind permission of the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Her letters to Valentine Chirol; letters from Sir Gilbert Clayton, Lord Cromer, and F.C.C. Balfour about her; and the letter from Sir Louis Mallet to Sir Edward Grey concerning her journey to Hayyil are reproduced by kind permission of Durham University Library.

Dick Doughty-Wylie's last letter to Mrs. Jean Coe is reproduced by kind permission of the executor of the will of the late Mrs. M. Inaund; and thanks to Tyne Tees Television for providing the tape
Gertrude Bell: The Uncrowned Queen of Iraq
, programme 2, “Mysteries” series.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Howell, Georgina, 1942–

[Daughter of the desert]

Gertrude Bell : queen of the desert, shaper of nations / Georgina Howell.

     p. cm.

“Originally published as: Daughter of the desert. London : Macmillan, 2006.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-374-16162-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-374-16162-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Bell, Gertrude Lowthian, 1868–1926. 2. Women travelers—Middle East—Biography. 3. Women archaeologists—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Women Asianists—Biography. 5. Colonial administrators—Great Britain—Biography. 6. Colonial administrators—Middle East—Biography. I. Title.

DA566.9.B39H69 2007
956'.02092—dc22
[B]

2006029994

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

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For, with, and also by Christopher Bailey

 

We are all the more one because we are many

For we have made ample room for love in the gap where we are sundered
.

Our unlikeness reveals its breath of beauty radiant with one common life
,

Like mountain peaks in the morning sun
.

—Rabindranath Tagore

Maps

Preface

1. GERTRUDE AND FLORENCE

2. EDUCATION

3. THE CIVILIZED WOMAN

4. BECOMING A PERSON

5. MOUNTAINEERING

6. DESERT TRAVEL

7. DICK DOUGHTY-WYLIE

8. LIMIT OF ENDURANCE

9. ESCAPE

10. WAR WORK

11. CAIRO, DELHI, BASRA

12. GOVERNMENT THROUGH GERTRUDE

13. ANGER

14. FAISAL

15. CORONATION

16. STAYING AND LEAVING

Chronology

Note on Money Values

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

I
t was summer, 1997. As contract writers for
The Sunday Times Magazine
, we had collected for dinner in a London restaurant at the invitation of the editor Robin Morgan, to hear his thoughts for the new winter features. Philip Norman, whose award-winning interviews have captured the magic and madness of rock 'n' roll; Vatican expert John Cornwell of Jesus College, Cambridge; Bryan Appleyard, who can explain advanced science and make it gloriously readable; and others were tucking into our duck
en croûte
when each of us was invited to write a feature for a series to be entitled “My Hero.” I returned home excited: I knew who “My Heroine” would be, and I thought a reminder of her glorious life was overdue. The feature, published that October, provoked the biggest mailbag I'd had in thirty-six years of journalism.

At one time more famous than Lawrence of Arabia, Gertrude Bell chose to compete on male terms in a masculine world. She avoided all publicity. She would not have cared that in an opening sequence of the popular 1997 film
The English Patient
, her name was taken in vain by British soldiers poring over a map spread out on a folding table in a camouflage tent:

“But can we get through those mountains?”

“The Bell maps show a way.”

Then: “Let's hope he was right.”

He!

When I started to write about Gertrude Bell I revered her as one of
those heroines of the Wilder Shores who followed their romantic notions here and there about the world. I loved the way she dressed and the way she lived—so stylishly, a pistol strapped to her calf under silk petticoats and dresses of lace and tucked muslin, her desert table laid with crisp linen and silver, her cartridges wrapped in white stockings and pushed into the toes of her Yapp canvas boots. She was not a feminist; she had no need or wish for special treatment. Like Mrs. Thatcher—admire her or despise her—she took on the world exactly as she found it. Only this was in the 1880s, when women were hardly educated or allowed to prove themselves outside the home.

The Bells were very rich: but it was not money that got Gertrude a First at Oxford, or helped her survive encounters with murderous tribes in the desert, or made her a spy or a major in the British army, or qualified her as poet, scholar, historian, mountaineer, photographer, archaeologist, gardener, cartographer, linguist, and distinguished servant of the state. In each of these fields she excelled, even pioneered. She was many-faceted—in this respect comparable with those giants among mankind, Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great of Russia. T. E. Lawrence wrote that Gertrude was “born too gifted.” But rigour was the real legacy that she was born with, and she was intensely proud of her family's pragmatism—their grasp of economics, the good management of their mighty steel business, and their public and private works of charity. When called upon, she dedicated herself to grinding, unglamorous office work: to the structuring and filing that transformed the wartime Wounded and Missing Office of the Red Cross from chaos to an efficiently functioning system; to the minutiae of administration and map-drawing; to the taking of hundreds of precise measurements at archaeological sites; and to the writing of reams of position papers in Basra and Baghdad.